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Talk:Last Forever - Part Two/@comment-2.31.231.255-20140404070113
(Not my viewer, but perfectly describes how most fans feel) How I Met Your Mother: An Outsider's POV I have never seen an episode of HIMYM. I have not seen the finale. When I saw the uproar from those I follow, I thought that the show had produced a sad ending. That they created characters everyone was attached to for 9 years, but in an attempt to make some statement about the cold reality of comedic entertainment, they created circumstances that made for a sad ending. I figured someone died, or was fired, or the couple you were cheering for didn’t get together. The world exploded. Something. And it took a while of not really paying too much attention to what everyone was saying to realize that the issue was NOT, in fact, a sad ending. While it was not flowers and sunshine for all characters, the audience was not sad. They were surprised. And this is where I began to be a bit more interested in the dynamics. Because the desire to surprise is innately juvenile. The desire to surprise stems from the desire to wield whatever power one holds in order to catch someone else off guard. While in the process of storytelling, one may include elements of surprise as part of the process of allowing the audience to experience the story from the perspective of the surprised character, an even moderately accomplished storyteller does not surprise just for the sake of surprising. For example, in the story of Beauty and the Beast, the storyteller could chose to tell the story from Belle’s perspective, and withhold the information that the Beast is a man under a curse. This surprise holds a purpose, because it would allow the audience to experience the fears and moral dilemmas that Belle faces with her. However, if one were to end the story with: “…and then after the wedding the Prince stabbed Belle. The End. Surprise!” - then that would be an example of a surprise just for the sake of surprising the audience. It does not fit with the story or characters. And that is where I found the dynamics of the response to the HIMYM finale to be interesting. It was not the circumstances that surprised the audience. It was the behavior of the characters. This is important, because this show has gone on for 9 seasons. If the storyteller has done a good job in creating these characters, then by this point, the audience should be intimately familiar with each characters’ motivations, desires, habits, personality, etc., such that the circumstances may surprise them, but the characters’ behaviors would not. So what I saw was an audience that was shocked, specifically at the characters’ behaviors. And this was how I realized where it all went wrong. In the juvenile pursuit of surprising their audience, the storytellers involved sacrificed the integrity of their story. Everything prior to the finale becomes an elaborate set up to a shout of “Surprise!” to the audience they tricked into watching it all. When I try to imagine how this happened, I picture a child trying to write a story and create characters and a plot, but then the child decides it’s crap, and just ends it with “and then dragons ate them all.”